The 12 Steps Health Systems Can Take to Achieve Population Health Management

The 12 Steps Health Systems Can Take to Achieve Population Health Management

For the first time in history, the tools required to understand and mitigate the myriad contributors to ill health in a community are available. Computer systems endowed with artificial intelligence, or AI, are already hard at work — collecting, reading, digitizing and parsing massive amounts of data from disparate sources. These systems are even learning and refining their ability to categorize and draw inferences from the information as they churn through it, then reporting the results in natural language. Perhaps the most iconic of cognitive computers is IBM’s Watson, now the cornerstone of an ambitious, eponymous new corporate health arm. But numerous vendors offer population health management (PHM) “solutions” — software suites that can, to varying degrees, pull together information from multiple existing health system sources to structure a data…